Now we are 13. Open Research Online becomes a teenager!

The history of the Open University (UK) institutional repository (Open Research Online) is one of changing requirements as defined by its research community, institutional administrators and external HE policy. How the repository has responded to these changes has ensured its success. However, how we manage the (potentially) competing requirements of compliance monitoring and Open Access dissemination will determine the future of the repository

The nutrient quality and labelling of ready-to-eat snack foods with health and/or nutrition claims

Background: Nutrition claims on food labels are used to attract attention to products. Inaccurate claims on ready-to-eat (RTE) snack food products may mislead consumers into consuming a higher volume of a seemingly ‘healthy’ product.Objectives: A study was undertaken to determine the following surrounding the packaging of RTE snack food products: (i) compliance of health and or nutrient claims; (ii) average nutrient content per snack category; (iii) accuracy of the total energy content; (iv) eligibility to make claims once the R429 legislation is implemented.Outcome measures: Nutrient content per 100 g and serving size was analysed. Claims related to nutrient content were audited.Design: An analysis was undertaken of the labels of 93 South African-produced RTE snack food products from 10 categories, displaying health and or nutrition claims.Results: Ninety-one products displayed nutrient content claims. Twenty-three (25.3%) nutrient content claims were noncompliant with the R146 legislation. Twenty-one (22.6%) displayed negative claims, three (14.3%) were ineligible. Eighteen products (19.4%) displayed endorsement claims, four (4.4%) were eligible. Sixty-four products (68.8%) displayed a higher total energy content when applying the conversion factors to the displayed macronutrient values. Only 22 (23.7%) products would be eligible to make health and/or nutrition claims once the R429 legislation is promulgated.Conclusion: A higher proportion of eligible claims were found. More than 70% of food manufacturers will need to make changes to the nutrient content or labels once the R429 legislation is implemented. A two-pronged approach of manufacturer compliance and consumer education may improve food choices and reduce the incidence of obesity and NCDs

Employer and employment agency attitudes towards employing individuals with mental health needs

Background: The positive benefits of paid employment for individuals with mental health needs are well known yet many still remain unemployed (Perkins & Rinaldi, (2002). Unemployment rates among patients with long-term mental health problems: A decade of rising unemployment. Psychiatric Bulletin, 26(8), 295–298.).\ud \ud Aims: Attitudes of employers and employment agencies that may provide short-term contracts to individuals with mental health needs are important to understand if these individuals are to be given access to paid employment.\ud \ud Methods: A mixed methods approach was used to investigate this phenomenon comprising of interviews and a follow-up survey. Interviews were conducted with 10 employment agencies and 10 employers. The results of these interviews then informed a follow-up survey of 200 businesses in Gloucestershire.\ud \ud Results: The findings demonstrated that employment agencies would consider putting forward individuals with previous mental health needs to employers. However, employers had a high level of concern around employing these individuals. Employers reported issues of trust, needing supervision, inability to use initiative and inability to deal with the public for individuals with either existing or previous mental health needs.\ud \ud Conclusions: The findings of this research suggest a need for employers to have more accurate information regarding hiring individuals with mental health needs

De novo sequence assembly and characterisation of a partial transcriptome for an evolutionarily distinct reptile, the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus)

BACKGROUND: The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of extraordinary zoological interest, being the only surviving member of an entire order of reptiles which diverged early in amniote evolution. In addition to their unique phylogenetic placement, many aspects of tuatara biology, including temperature-dependent sex determination, cold adaptation and extreme longevity have the potential to inform studies of genome evolution and development. Despite increasing interest in the tuatara genome, genomic resources for the species are still very limited. We aimed to address this by assembling a transcriptome for tuatara from an early-stage embryo, which will provide a resource for genome annotation, molecular marker development and studies of development and adaptation in tuatara. RESULTS: We obtained 30 million paired-end 50 bp reads from an Illumina Genome Analyzer and assembled them with Velvet and Oases using a range of kmers. After removing redundancy and filtering out low quality transcripts, our transcriptome dataset contained 32911 transcripts, with an N50 of 675 and a mean length of 451 bp. Almost 50% (15965) of these transcripts could be annotated by comparison with the NCBI non-redundant (NR) protein database or the chicken, green anole and zebrafish UniGene sets. A scan of candidate genes and repetitive elements revealed genes involved in immune function, sex differentiation and temperature-sensitivity, as well as over 200 microsatellite markers. CONCLUSIONS: This dataset represents a major increase in genomic resources for the tuatara, increasing the number of annotated gene sequences from just 60 to almost 16,000. This will facilitate future research in sex determination, genome evolution, local adaptation and population genetics of tuatara, as well as inform studies on amniote evolution

Employer and employment agency attitudes towards employing individuals with mental health needs

Background: The positive benefits of paid employment for individuals with mental health needs are well known yet many still remain unemployed (Perkins & Rinaldi, (2002). Unemployment rates among patients with long-term mental health problems: A decade of rising unemployment. Psychiatric Bulletin, 26(8), 295–298.). Aims: Attitudes of employers and employment agencies that may provide short-term contracts to individuals with mental health needs are important to understand if these individuals are to be given access to paid employment. Methods: A mixed methods approach was used to investigate this phenomenon comprising of interviews and a follow-up survey. Interviews were conducted with 10 employment agencies and 10 employers. The results of these interviews then informed a follow-up survey of 200 businesses in Gloucestershire. Results: The findings demonstrated that employment agencies would consider putting forward individuals with previous mental health needs to employers. However, employers had a high level of concern around employing these individuals. Employers reported issues of trust, needing supervision, inability to use initiative and inability to deal with the public for individuals with either existing or previous mental health needs. Conclusions: The findings of this research suggest a need for employers to have more accurate information regarding hiring individuals with mental health needs

Temporal dynamics of anaplasma marginale infections and the composition of Anaplasma spp. in calves in the Mnisi communal area, Mpumalanga, South Africa

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT: All the sequences generated in this study are available under BioProject accession number PRJNA929355. Anaplasma msp1a and 16S rRNA nucleotide sequences generated in this study were deposited in GenBank under accession numbers OQ384772–OQ384912 and OQ348128- OQ348132 respectively. The raw microbiome data from the ten calves is available at the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with BioProject accession number PRJNA929355.Please read abstract in article.The National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation through its Framework Agreement with the Institute for Tropical Medicine, and the Agricultural Sector Education Training Authority (AgriSETA).https://www.mdpi.com/journal/microorganismsProduction Animal StudiesVeterinary Tropical DiseasesSDG-02:Zero HungerSDG-03:Good heatlh and well-bein

Catching allergy by a simple questionnaire

Background: Identifying allergic rhinitis requires allergy testing, but the first-line referral for rhinitis are usually primary care physicians (PCP), who are not familiar with such tests. The availability of easy and simple tests to be used by PCP to suggest allergy should be very useful. Methods: The Respiratory Allergy Prediction (RAP) test, based on 9 questions and previously validated by a panel of experts, was evaluated in this study. Results: An overall number of 401 patients (48.6% males, age range 14-62 years) with respiratory symptoms was included. Of them, 89 (22.2%) showed negative results to SPT, while 312 (77.8%) had at least one positive result to SPT. Cohen's kappa coefficient showed that all questions had an almost perfect excellent agreement between pre and post-test. The algorithm of decision-tree growth Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector showed that answering yes to the question 4 (Your nasal/ocular complains do usually start or worsen during the spring?), 6 (Did you ever had cough or shortness of breath, even during exercise?) and 8 (Do you use nasal sprays frequently?) gave a probability to have a positive SPT of 85%. Conclusions: These findings show that RAP test can be proposed as an useful tool to be used by physician other than allergists when evaluating patients with rhinitis, suggesting the need of allergy testing

Training future generations to deliver evidence-based conservation and ecosystem management

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an effective contribution to conservation practice. 3. To help overcome this problem we have created open access online teaching materials in multiple languages that are stored in Applied Ecology Resources. So far, 117 educators from 23 countries have acknowledged the importance of this and are already teaching or about to teach skills in appraising or using evidence in conservation decision-making. This includes 145 undergraduate, postgraduate or professional development courses. 4. We call for wider teaching of the tools and skills that facilitate evidence-based conservation and also suggest that providing online teaching materials in multiple languages could be beneficial for improving global understanding of other subject areas.Peer reviewe